


house of cards

by youaremarvelous



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Healing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 03:57:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15622020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youaremarvelous/pseuds/youaremarvelous
Summary: For Keith, surviving was second nature. His dad had taught him how, he’d spent his whole life doing it. But living was something else entirely.





	house of cards

That summer, the desert simmered like grease in a hot pan. Wildfires had eaten up the western part of the state and the smoke billowed out for miles, an ominous yellow haze that settled over the surrounding landscape like a lid. Keith spent his afternoons chasing around lizards in the brittlebush, retreating to the back porch when the sun reached the top of the sky and the sand burned like stove coils under his sneakers.

 

His dad had told him it was a good ten degrees cooler in the shade. He’d said it with a wink like he was doing him a favor. Like ten degrees made a scrap of difference when the temperature had been hovering in the low hundreds.

 

Keith would pick at scabs on his knees and flip mindlessly through long-overdue library books, replace the oppressive heat with cold cavities of deep space. -454° Fahrenheit, the books said. -464° in the shade.

 

“You eat yet?” His dad asked when he got home, three hours later than normal and smelling of smoke.  

 

Keith sat shirtless at the kitchen table—feet in the chair, knees under his chin—fiddling with the little cherry red transistor radio his dad had found at a rummage sale last weekend. The antenna was rusted and wouldn’t extend past the second rung, but Keith could catch staticky pockets of the classic rock station if he angled it just right.

 

He tilted the radio back, raised it off the table in careful increments. It was easier to concentrate on the dissonant whistle of a lost transmission than the smear of ash on his dad’s cheek. A jangling tangle of haunted voices bobbed from the speakers—“ _come on, baby, light my_ —” before sinking again into a web of white noise.

 

“Keith.”

 

Keith licked at the sweat beading on his upper lip and shrugged a shoulder.

 

His dad sighed. “How about macaroni? Blue box special.”

 

“We’re out of milk.”

 

“Aw, milk’s a luxury. We can substitute water and double the butter.”

 

It wasn’t worth the argument. Keith lowered the radio and unstuck himself from the rickety ladder back chair. When he reached the cabinets his dad caught him with an arm around his shoulders. A quick squeeze perfumed with char. “Don’t wait around for me to eat next time. Got it, scout?”

 

He was always worried about Keith’s ability to take care of himself, stacking up survival tips like a house of cards, swaying precariously in the parched eastward winds. It unnerved Keith, but he tucked the knowledge into the back of his head like sand-polished quartz into his pockets.

 

Watch the sky for changes in weather. If you get lost, look for a road and follow it. Don’t ration your water. If you’re thirsty, you’re dehydrated, and don’t open your mouth except to drink.

 

When the balance finally tipped, when the cards inevitably toppled, Keith found himself on the dawn of his sixth day alone, his second on the road, water supply dwindled to a hot mouthful in a plastic gallon jug. He settled under the dappled shade of a thick paloverde, dizzy and sick, shirt soaked through with sweat and stuck to his back like a second skin.

 

Keith groped at his memory for something useful, but it fizzed out right when it mattered most like the classic rock songs on his old transistor radio.

 

His dad had never told him that you go crazy from dehydration before you die from it.

 

He never told him that the wet smack of rain against a tin roof crackles like fire.

 

* * *

 

 

Space was cold, shade or no. Now Keith knew it firsthand. He hadn’t been there in nearly half a year, but the memory clung like the heavy scent of smoke on his dad’s old clothes. All it took was a plane flying too low and he was there again, racing after Galra battlecruisers, white stars darting past like snow.

 

That summer, he slept curved against Shiro’s spine, arm draped over his waist, Shiro’s ass cradled in the swing of Keith’s hips. Every morning they’d wake up soaked in sweat. It was too hot to be that close, but the shared rhythm of a metronome heartbeat was like gravity in the darkness. It was the only thing capable of grounding them. So they’d shuck off their clothes, kick down the sheets, and melt together.    

 

In Keith’s dreams, Shiro died a million deaths.  

 

The resinous smell of vinegar and ash, skin cracked like leather, limned by acetic light. Star-studded pools of blood grasping out like fingers—black as space, black as nothing.

 

He’d wake with the taste of pennies in his throat, Shiro’s hand tangled in his hair.  

 

“You awake?”

 

Keith turned his face into the pillow in lieu of an answer. They didn’t talk about the nightmares, anymore. Hadn’t for weeks now. But the evidence was there in Keith’s lengthening bouts of silence and Shiro’s thinning patience. You don’t get thrust unwittingly into an intergalactic war zone and not come out with at least a handful of new neuroses to toss onto the pile.

 

Shiro’s voice was sleep-graveled and on the edge of a laugh. “Is that a yes or a no?”

 

Keith groaned. Shiro’s ability to rouse fully alert was a habit of self-defense. He understood that on an intellectual level, but he could never fathom the good mood that often accompanied it.

 

“Oh my god, Keith,” Shiro breathed, “your ears.”

 

And damn him, the statement was just weird enough to elicit his attention. Keith rolled his head back, gummy vision tracking Shiro’s eyes to his mouth. Cheek creased from his pillow, a tender smile.

 

“What about them?”

 

“They’re huge.”

 

Keith draped an arm over his face.

 

“I never noticed. Wow. Your hearing must be amazing.”

 

Keith ignored him. He closed his eyes and pretended it was possible to sink back into unconsciousness. That it wasn’t a luxury.

 

“Hey—” Shiro said, harder now. He peeled Keith’s arm away from his face. “Don’t go back to sleep. You have to work on the roof before it gets too hot.”

 

“Why don’t you work on the roof?” Keith asked, just to be petulant. Just because it was Shiro and he could.

 

Shiro’s lips dipped at the corner like a comma. He traced the edge of Keith’s scar with his thumb—carefully, like he was made of something more fragile than hard bone and compact muscle.   

 

“You know why.”

 

Keith fitted his hand over Shiro’s and gathered his fingers in a firm, squeezing grip.

 

“Keith.”

 

“I know.” Keith used their entwined hands as leverage to pull himself up. He pressed a crooked kiss to the edge of Shiro’s mouth because he loved him. Because it was too early for uncomfortable topics. “I know, already, geez. Tell Mr. Holt I say hi.”

 

It was an event whenever Shiro left the house on his own. They didn’t talk about the first time, anymore, but Lance did. He’d relay it in exaggerated pantomime to an audience of their closest friends and family. Keith hotwiring a car, speeding through a residential area at 90 mph, evading police, punching an officer, and getting himself tossed in a jail cell until Shiro turned up with a mediating smile and a Voltron name-drop. All because Shiro was twenty minutes late getting home from the dentist.  

 

Shiro would chuckle softly at Lance’s dramatic retelling, but he didn’t like it. Keith had dedicated too much of his life tethering his thoughts to him to not recognize the furrow between his eyebrows, the tense square of his jaw.

 

Keith appreciated his concern, but it was nice to hear Lance tell it. Relayed from a space other than his own memory, Keith was able to separate the absurdity of his actions from his  own fatalistic thoughts. The absolute, choking certainty that Shiro was gone. Irretrievable. For good this time.

 

Somewhere along the way, Keith had started stacking up his own cards. Little evidences of his and Shiro’s intertwining lives. A silk robe slung over the bathroom door with a pair of Keith’s underwear, a half-empty can of Shiro’s favorite Japanese beer in the sink, a single white pube on the toilet seat.

 

It was happiness, but Keith didn’t trust it. He didn’t know how to stop expecting it to topple.

 

That morning, he tried not to cling while Shiro made his coffee—more parts soy milk and sugar because he still had trouble stomaching the caffeine. Keith left the kitchen altogether. He loitered around the bedroom before moving to the bathroom, sitting on the side of the tub, looping the sash of Shiro’s robe over his fingers so tight the tips turned red, then blue.

 

When Shiro finally left—a less-than-chaste kiss and ass grope turned lengthy hug later—Keith rolled his shoulders and stomped his feet into his boots. He trekked outside with his work gloves hanging from his teeth, a caulking gun tucked under his arm. The ground rumbled under his feet, a gentle vibration that stirred up memories of burnt coal and oil slick abalone.

 

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you,” Keith placated. He trudged towards the back of the house, shielding his eyes from the overbright sun.

 

Black towered behind the shack, buried up to his haunches in yellow sand. Ideally, they’d have moved him somewhere better hidden from the elements—from the unnameable threat impressed into the back of their minds—but the move had depleted whatever was left of his waning energy reserves. So he sat in their yard for now, an overgrown lawn ornament, a giant cat in its litter box, glittering with a fine salt patina.

 

“Hey, boy.” Keith patted Black’s metal leg. The heat of the morning was already thick and suffocating as a damp towel, but Black was cool under his fingers—thrumming quiet and dark like the strained purple twilight.

 

He was getting stronger, they’d be able to move him somewhere more suitable before too long.

 

“You’ll spot me, yeah?” Keith asked the wind. Black was still, silent as granite, but Keith felt his presence a few hours into his work, bubbling like sticky tar when Keith dropped his caulking gun and ripped the seat of his pants on a loose nail trying to retrieve it. Black was laughing. Keith leaned back on the sun-baked shingles and laughed, too.    

 

When the roof was thoroughly patched, Keith peeled off his sweat-soaked shirt and lounged in the shade of Black’s belly. Ten degrees cooler. More if you factored in Black’s residual energy, cold and empty as a pocket. He flipped through old Altean books borrowed from Coran, listened to the wind rattle like skeletons through the dried out foothills and didn’t let it mean anything.

 

When the sun sank towards the hills, combing the sky in citrus streaks of orange and pink, Keith moved back to the shack. Shiro was due back half an hour ago. He paced the room, then sat. Drummed his fingers on the table and contemplated calling Sam, maybe walking towards the road, testing if Black had enough charge to fly to town.

 

Instead, he filled a pot with water and dropped it on a burner. Keith had never learned the finer points of cooking, but macaroni and cheese seemed easy enough. You had your macaroni, you had your cheese (or at least a close approximation), you had your clearly-printed instructions on the side of a blue cardboard box. It wasn’t exactly rocket science.

 

He was halfway through boiling the pasta before he realized they were out of milk.    

 

Keith slammed the fridge closed with his foot. A jangle of jelly jars and salad dressing chorused his distress. It was a small thing, but it was always the small things. Plunking like pebbles into Keith’s life, rippling out with disproportionate consequence.

 

A paranoid web of strings pinned to the wall, a cherished family heirloom, a cigarette butt, carelessly tossed into a shrub at the height of a summer-long drought.

 

Keith fell into a chair, tipped his chin to the ceiling, concentrated on breathing through his frustration, his fear. Striated tourmaline and riverbeds of black water flickered like a dilapidated film reel behind his eyes. Black was trying to comfort him. It was the final indignity.

 

Keith clambered to his feet and stomped back to the stove. He had faced down Galra fleets, traversed alien planets and forcibly yanked Shiro back from death more than once. He refused to be undone by something as mundane as macaroni and cheese. He refused to become Shiro’s burden, dragged around like a dead foot.

 

As if summoned, the low growl of an engine ate up the quiet of the kitchen. Amber headlights sliced through the slatted blinds. Darkness. Then the familiar cadence of footsteps crunching up the pebbled sidewalk, unspooling in Keith’s chest like a long length of rope.

 

“You’re late,” Keith said when the door opened. He spooned steaming macaroni into two bowls. Milk substituted with water and double the butter. The end result was greasy, half-boiled pasta floated in a soup of neon orange preservatives. But it was edible. Mostly.

 

Shiro tossed his keys on the counter. “I stopped by the grocery store—” he held up a plastic bag as proof—“we’re out of milk.”

 

Keith wanted to laugh, at himself, at the situation. Instead, inexplicably, his throat knotted. It was ridiculous to get emotional over milk, but this was his life. These were his cards. Surviving was second nature, his dad had taught him how. Keith had spent his whole life doing it. But living—believing in the mundanity of tomorrow—was something else entirely. It was uncharted territory.  

 

Keith charged across the room with purpose, coiled his arms around Shiro’s waist, pressed his face into Shiro’s chest. He felt his heartbeat under his cheek—steady and insistent—and the story it unraveled in fine definition.  

 

Shiro accepted him like he always did, with open arms, lips pressed against Keith’s temple. “You good?” He asked, cradling the back of Keith’s head in his big hand.

 

Keith was, though he couldn’t say it just then. He’d stacked up his cards, one by one, and there was no guarantee they’d never fall. The future wasn’t promised, and more than Galra or exploding planets or the insatiable fire, devouring the west like a cavernous mouth, that scared him. The length of their forever would never be enough, but it’s what they had.

 

All in all, it wasn’t a bad hand to be dealt.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://youremarvelous.tumblr.com/post/176786918883/house-of-cards)


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